Hello everyone,

Greetings from the UK.

I'm 24 and a film propmaker, but hopefully I will soon gain an
apprenticeship to a theatrical armourer in the UK. I'm glad to see
that this list is operating and I look foward to future discussions.

I don't know if you blokes would be interested but I recently spoke
with Andrew Fletcher, a British armourer who worked on the Lebel
rifles that were used in 'The Mummy' and were subsequently hired to
Simon Atherton.

This is taken from an article I have written about the work of
British armourers/ gun wranglers and is due to be published in a
forthcoming edition of the special effects publication 'Sci-Fi &
Fantasy Models International'.

Andrew Fletcher: However in the case of a weapon that hasn't
often been used, it will usually go through a restoration period
prior to use.

If it a weapon is chambered in an obsolete or rare calibre, say a WW1
8mm Lebel rifle, then we will use the closest thing available. In the
case of the Lebel, we used Russian 7.62mm x 54. However, the rifle
operates from a tube magazine, so it requires a full length round to
operate.

The blanks we utilised were full length and crimped, but were only
produced in Yugoslavia. After all the troubles there, they were no
longer available, so we had to use blanks with shorter cases.

This meant an alteration to the Lebel magazine, so that it
wouldn't double feed two rounds at the same time.

We later found that we could adapting an existing case to meet our
needs. This is typical of the changes that are forced upon us.

----
Geoff Topping